Notes

HOOTING YARD MUSIC PRIZE 2006
Last week, outside a semi-derelict tin kiosk perched on the brow of Pang Hill, our favourite octogenarian crone Mrs Gubbins announced the Hooting Yard Music Prize 2006. Here is a transcript of her speech, from which various interruptions (hacking cough, drooling, unexplained shrieks) have been excised:
The rules for the Hooting Yard Music Prize this year are so simple that even the snivelling infants chained up in Pang Hill Orphanage will be able to understand them. Rule One is that the entries should be musical settings of words taken from anywhere on the Hooting Yard website. That includes all the quotations from other writers with which each bulletin begins. Rule Two is that entries should aspire to sound like the piece of music described by Marie Corelli in The Sorrows Of Satan (1895). I quote:

Marie Corelli
"The music swelled into passionate cadence--melodies crossed and re-crossed each other like rays of light glittering among green leaves--voices of birds and streams and tossing waterfalls chimed in with songs of love and playful merriment; anon came wilder strains of grief and angry clamour; cries of despair were heard echoing through the thunderous noise of some relentless storm, farewells everlastingly shrieked amid sobs of reluctant shuddering agony; and then, as I listened, before my eyes a black mist gathered slowly, and I thought I saw great rocks bursting asunder into flame, and drifting islands in a sea of fire--faces, wonderful, hideous, beautiful, peered at me out of a darkness denser than night, and in the midst of this there came a tune, complete in sweetness and suggestion--a piercing, sword-like tune that plunged into my very heart and rankled there--my breath failed me, my senses swam, I felt that I must move, speak, cry out, and implore that this music, this horribly insidious music should cease ere I swooned with the voluptuous poison of it--when, with a full chord of splendid harmony that rolled out upon the air like a breaking wave, the intoxicating sounds ebbed away into silence. No one spoke--our hearts were yet beating too wildly with the pulsations roused by that wondrous lyric storm. Diana Chesney was the first to break the spell. 'Well, that beats everything I've ever heard!' she murmured tremulously."
Before you start to complain that one can hardly affix an exclamation mark to a murmur, tremulous or otherwise, I want you to reread those two rules. That is all you need to know. So pick up your viol or banjo or sackbut or what have you, choose some words from the Hooting Yard website, and set to work as if your life depended upon it!
Insignificant details such as closing date, judging panel, prize etc will follow.

A HYMN
(To the tune of Bring Me Your Winding-Sheet, Oh Mother Of Mine)
Cold and dark is this awful night, as I shiver in my shed. The Lord He has forsaken me and deprived me of my bed. I have no pies nor pastries to shovel down my gob. Oh the Lord He has forsaken me. All I can do is sob.
I weep in my allotment shed, I weep until the dawn. I curse the very buttercups upon the village lawn. The Lord He has forsaken me and I am so forlorn. I wail and gnash my rotting teeth that I was ever born.
My name is Leo Sayer, I am short, with frizzy hair. I sit here in my wooden shed upon a wooden chair. I curse the fact that I share my name with a singer of pop pap, and then I spill my flask of boiling tea into my lap.
The Lord He has forsaken me, all I can do is whine. O Lord God Almighty, please send me a sign. Please stop people thinking that I'm the singer Leo S, the small-of-stature minstrel who got me in this mess.
He fled to the Antipodes, or so I have been told. He moved across the globe because his records undersold. It seems the Lord forsook him too, but that is only right. I sob and wail in my shed on this dark and awful night.
DETOURS : Muggletonian Celestial Prints ... Rapture Ready ... Nice Cup Of Tea And A Sit Down

FORT HOITY
Came the day the fanatical adherents of Trebizondo Culpeper smashed their way by main force through the huge iron gates of Fort Hoity. They were both astonished and disappointed to find the fort deserted, save for a tethered goat in the courtyard. The goat's tether extended far enough for it to be able to reach a flowerbed by one fort wall, so it was a well-nourished goat as well as a tethered goat.
"That goat," said the fanatical Trebizondo Culpeper adherent they called Bim, "Has eaten half the flowers in that flowerbed, and has not even begun on the weeds."
His companions jotted this observation down in their logbooks, under "B For Bim". They each used the spidery handwriting they had learned at the feet of Trebizondo Culpeper's pencilling master, the nameless gravel-voiced Peruvian laundry basket man who had inadvertently sent them to Fort Hoity in the first place. Replacing their logbooks in their pockets, the adherents gathered about Bim, who was now lolling by a brazier in which hot coals burned still. Clearly, the fort had not long been abandoned.
"This fort has not long been abandoned," said Bim, "For the coals in this brazier burn still. But how did the fort people flee? If they had left by the huge iron gates, we would have seen them when we were standing on the hill as dawn broke and we ate our breakfasts. The plans of the fort which we have studied so conscientiously show no other exits. This, then, is a highly perplexing circumstance. I wonder if that goat, in addition to being tethered and well-fed, is also a talking goat?"
The fanatical adherent known as Bam slapped his forehead. "For crying out loud, Bim!" he shouted, "Have you taken leave of your senses? There is no such thing under the heavens as a goat that speaks human languages. That is the stuff of fairy tales."
The other fanatical adherents mumbled together as a group. Both Bim and Bam had them confused now, for they had expected to enter Fort Hoity through main force and to be chopping and slashing and unleashing madcap havoc. Instead they were standing around mumbling and pondering the connection, if there was one, between fairies, elves, sprites and goats. The fanatical adherent named Diocletian, much mustachioed, raised the topic of tethering. If one could tether a goat, as the Fort Hoity goat had been tethered, could one tether a fairy? Would a fairy not be nimble enough to slip its bonds? To this, Pembroket suggested that a fairy could surely be tethered by using gossamer thin magical thread. The mumbling grew louder. Time was passing. Bim made an announcement.
"Not many leagues yonder is Fort Toity. I know in my bones that that is where the Fort Hoity people have gone. I know not how they got there, but that is where they must be. We shall leave a team here to secure the place, and the rest of us will march like the clappers to Fort Toity. And we shall untether the goat and take it with us."
And so Bim and his bedraggled gang of fanatical Trebizondo Culpeper adherents set out to traipse across the plain, whistling as they marched. Those who had not undergone whistling training parped hooters instead, or imitated crows, corncrakes, and loons. Every so often they would stop and sit, and eat from their bags of confectionery, and Bim or Bam would make pronouncements and the band of fanatical adherents would jot down their apercus. All sorts of subjects related to the teachings of Trebizondo Culpeper were covered, from dishwater and clanging noises to oil slicks and the bossa nova, from freckles and optometry to cuddy and tack. They tied a colourful and perfumed rag to one ear of the untethered goat, and let it lead the way across the plain towards Fort Toity.
So who were they, the people they pursued, who had fled from Fort Hoity to Fort Toity and who were now being borne down upon, slowly but surely, by the fanatical adherents of Trebizondo Culpeper and an untethered goat? First, they were the people who made miniature cardboard hens and placed them on the sides of paths. Second, they execrated the very name of Trebizondo Culpeper, regularly, every night in fact, as they sat around their brazier of hot coals, staring at the moon, if it was visible through the clouds. If the moon was not visible they shut their eyes. They would sit quite still for so long that birds would nest in their hair and moss grow upon their feet. There were more than a hundred of them, and they worshipped nothing, not even the tethered goat they had so cruelly abandoned back at Fort Hoity.
Why did they not take the goat with them, as they fled? This is the kind of question the out of print pamphleteer Dobson would have addressed, had he been alive at the time of which I write. But he was yet to be born. It is hard for us to imagine a world without Dobson, a world where inexplicable things could happen--did happen!--and there was no hastily-scribbled pamphlet issued, within days or weeks, to make sense of events. How one would have longed for even a few precious pages entitled Why Those Who Fled Fort Hoity For Fort Toity To Escape The Fanatical Adherents Of Trebizondo Culpeper Cruelly Abandoned Their Tethered Goat, With Footnotes And A Map!
A map would certainly have been of use to the pursuers, who became utterly lost on that barren plain. Try as they might, they could not find Fort Toity. They wandered for months, led by the goat, until their confectionery bags were empty, and the batteries on Bim's portable metal tapping machine were dead. They were far from home, exhausted and hungry and increasingly rancorous. Pembroket in particular was thoroughly frazzled, and took to poking his fellows with a pointy stick, until they took it away from him and stamped on his toes until he promised to desist. And desist he did, for he fell victim to an ague, sweating and shaking and babbling incoherent gibberish. Bam accused him of having a spurious ague, to elicit sympathy.
Diocletian said "This is not the first time you have made an accusation of spurious ague, Bam. Do you have an idee fixee?"
Bam replied: "Yes I do. Is that so wrong?"
But Pembroket's ague was all too real, and it was on the Thursday morning he expired out on that plain that the fanatical adherents of Trebizondo Culpeper were plunged into despair. One by one they perished, and with them perished the cult of Trebizondo Culpeper.

THE MIGHT OF PATIENCE
By popular demand, here is another of Marigold Chew's pieces of "interstitial prose" (see yesterday's item on Chewism). This one is a little moral fable taken from Stories From Life by Marden Vice Harden:
Brethren, we find ourselves, today, in a village in China. Perhaps some would feel inclined to ridicule rather than applaud the patience of a poor Chinese woman who tried to make a needle from a rod of iron by rubbing it against a stone. We may scoff and laugh and snicker like rude and common folk do. It is doubtful whether she succeeded or not, but, so the story runs, the sight of the worker plying her seemingly hopeless task, put new courage and determination into the heart of a young Chinese student, who, in deep despondency, stood watching her. He was a spindly little chap whose greatest joy was to be found in the study of industrious leaf-cutter ants, of which he kept teeming thousands in a glass case in the parlour of his pneumonia-racked mother. Because of repeated failures in his studies, ambition and hope had left him. He could think only of ants. Bitterly disappointed with himself, and despairing of ever accomplishing anything, the young man had thrown his books aside in disgust. He had even cast aside a five-volume encyclopaedia devoted entirely to the world of insects; ants alone filled the pages of books one and two. Put to shame, however, by the lesson taught by the old woman, he gathered his scattered forces together, went to work with renewed ardour, and, wedding Patience and Energy, became, in time, one of the greatest scholars in China. Actually, that's not strictly true: he ended up sewing cummerbunds-for-export in a Batavian sweatshop. When you know you are on the right track, do not let any failures dim your vision or discourage you, for you cannot tell how close you may be to victory. And even if every damned thing goes wrong, there is no shame in being a deluded pauper. Have patience and stick, stick, stick. Then stick a bit more. It is eternally true that he "Who steers right on / Will gain, at length, however far, the port. / Though he be seasick all the way / And quite bereft of thought."